


A Handful of Jokers

by MLake867



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Awesome Darcy Lewis, Gen, Jane Foster & Darcy Lewis Friendship, Lethal joke power
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 04:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14926955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MLake867/pseuds/MLake867
Summary: Darcy's secret superpower seems pretty lame.





	A Handful of Jokers

Darcy Lewis had a secret; one that even she didn’t know until a week after she and Jane Foster moved into the Avengers’ tower, a few months after the Dark Elves’ invasion was thwarted. Darcy had a superpower. She discovered it while Iron Man was on the way back to the tower for repairs after a grueling mission. None of the other Avengers had been to the tower since she had moved in and she was looking forward to meeting Tony Stark. She went down to his lab to see if he had arrived yet and found a man there who looked to be in his mid-twenties. She hadn’t seen him before and she wasn’t sure he was supposed to be there. She said, “Hi, I’m Darcy, and you are?”

He said, “I’m David Schryer, I’m Pepper Potts’s assistant.”

“If you’re Pepper’s assistant, what are you doing here?”

“Mr. Stark asked me to find a microchip he misplaced a few weeks ago that he needs to repair his suit when he gets back.”

“I’ve never seen you around here, why would you be able to find it?”

He looked a bit embarrassed, “actually it’s kind of a superpower.”

Curious, she asked, “Kind of?”

“Yes. I can find anything. I just want to know where it is and I get a vision of it that lasts about 30 seconds. I can point to it, even tell approximately how far away it is. Well, I know exactly where it is, but translating that to feet and miles is a bit of a crapshoot. After that 30 seconds, I forget exactly where it is. That’s why I have to write it down or record it if I can’t get to it in 30 seconds.”

“So why not just keep finding the thing?”

“Once I’ve found something, I can’t find it, or anything within about a foot of it, for at least a week. The power works fine for stuff in the same room, but for something far away it can take weeks of triangulating and zeroing in to find it, and that’s if it doesn’t move in the meantime. Say, want to help with this microchip? He said he lost it in his lab.”

“Sure.”

They went into Tony’s lab (Jarvis let them in). David stood in the center of the lab, closed his eyes, and concentrated. “It fell into a floor vent behind that bench,” he pointed. David then forgot where it was, but Darcy remembered. They moved the bench and opened the floor vent and both reached in. Darcy felt a bit dizzy for a moment when their hands touched, then she felt the chip and pulled it out of the vent. “Wow! That actually worked. Can you find my keys?”

He laughed, pointed toward Jane’s lab, and said, “on a chair in the lab, that way.”

She ran and found them and came back. “OK, I’m convinced. It may not be flashy, but that’s a handy power.”

“It’s one of the reasons Ms. Potts hired me. It was nice meeting you; maybe I’ll see you around.” He smiled as he left, leaving the chip with her to give to Tony.

The rest of the day was a mixed bag; she got to meet Tony, and made a good first impression. They flirted a bit, which was cool. Unfortunately at the restaurant where she and Jane went for dinner, Jane insisted on boring her with facts about the Sun that she’d been reading in an astronomy book she was reviewing. So what if the center of the Sun was 150 times denser than water, millions of degrees hot, and trillions of psi pressure, blah, blah, blah? Darcy’s mind wandered from the useless trivia to where their waiter was with their food when suddenly she got a vision of their waiter in the kitchen and knew exactly what direction he was in and how far away. The vision lasted about 30 seconds and was then gone, along with the knowledge of exactly where the waiter was.

 _Holy Mew-mew, I’ve copied David’s power._ She thought. _It must have happened when I touched his hand. That’s why I felt dizzy. I can copy people’s powers! Call the lightning! OK, so not Thor’s power. Maybe it only works on humans._

She wondered if it would fade, but over the next few weeks she tested it and it didn’t. She found she could find things anywhere in the world and even on other planets too. She got a nice (though short) look at the Mars rover. Her favorite use though, was in finding the best food in town. She had already found the best coffee, the best donuts, and the best hamburgers in New York City and, after weeks of triangulating and zooming in, was sure she would soon find the best pizza place in a few days when she could “find” it again.

Then Captain America came back to the tower. She hoped her copycat power would work on him. He was very polite when he met her and she shook his hand. At that point, the speed, strength, endurance, and rapid healing of Captain America, utterly failed to become hers. _Rats_. She thought. _Maybe it doesn’t work on people with artificial upgrades. So it probably won’t work on Black Widow either. I know it didn’t work on Thor’s powers. Still, I’d better be careful never to touch Bruce Banner. Ah well, the finding power is good enough._

She had thought about telling Jane, but Jane would probably tell Thor, who’d tell the rest of the Avengers, who might tell SHIELD, and she really didn’t want to deal with that, so she kept it to herself. As it turned out, that worked out for the best when Hydra kidnapped her later that week.

She had finally identified the best pizza place in New York City and had her hand on the door handle to go in for an early lunch, when she felt a pinch on the back of her leg. Looking down, she saw a tranquilizer dart sticking out of it. _What the…_ was all she had time to think before she collapsed into the arms of a Hydra agent behind her.

When she woke up she found herself in a cell with two other prisoners, a man and a woman. “Where the hell am I?”

“We’ve been captured by Hydra.” Said the man.

“Wait, like the Nazi mad-scientists from WWII?”

“Yeah, apparently they are still around.” Said the woman. “I’m Judy Swarn, he’s Michael Dvarapala. We’re Jokers.”

“Comedians?”

“No, that’s what they call people with ‘powers’ that are basically a joke, at least in combat. Michael here can open portals between any two points he can see.”

Darcy blinked, “That doesn’t sound like a joke.”

Michael smiled sadly and said, “I can open a few hundred per minute all day long, but each of the portals are about a millimeter across and last for less than a microsecond. Also, I am severely nearsighted, so without my glasses, both ends would have to be within a few feet of my face.”

Darcy tried to think of a use for them. “Can you move one of them to bore a hole in something?”

Michael sighed, “No. They are stationary relative to whatever room or container they are in.”

Darcy didn’t give up that easily. “What if someone walks into one, will it cut them?”

Another sigh, “No, by the time someone could bump into one, it vanishes. When they kidnapped me, they had hoped that I could be forced to put a poison directly in someone’s stomach, but even if I have line of sight on someone, I can’t see the inside of a person’s stomach. Also, the portal is only open for a about a microsecond with a millimeter sized opening, almost no poison would get through, even if I opened hundreds of them. Trust me, they tried everything they could think of to weaponize this and came up with nothing. That’s why I’m a Joker.”

Darcy said, “Great. What about you Judy?”

“Well, you know how most people can only focus on one thing at a time?” Darcy nodded. “Well, I can actually think in parallel. I can have multiple independent trains of thought going at the same time. Give me two keyboards and I can compose and type one letter with one hand while at the same time composing and typing a different letter on an unrelated subject with the other hand. I can have up to a few hundred trains of thought going at the same time.”

“That sounds really useful, you could outthink anyone.”

“Yeah, except that the more trains of thought I am thinking at once, the simpler each one has to be. Get to a couple of hundred and I could maybe do a couple of hundred basic arithmetic operations at once, but not much more than that. And of course I can’t type them any faster than anyone else could, so knowing 400 answers at the same time would be pointless. Before I got kidnapped I had a job transcribing data from hand written surveys into a computer. I liked it because the job was pretty mindless and I could read a couple of romance novels at the same time as I typed in the surveys. Hydra hoped to use me as some kind of data correlating mastermind, but I’m no better than 2-3 well informed, but pretty dumb, people working together.”

“Terrific. Anyway, I’m Darcy Lewis. I’m not sure why they would kidnap me.”

Judy looked at Michael and said, “The guards were talking about it amongst themselves when they came in here. They said it was to distract someone named Thor while Project Insight was launched.”

“You don’t know who Thor is? How long have you been in here? And what is Project Insight.”

Judy said, “I got kidnapped in 2009, Michael in 2010. They can’t release us because of what we know, but they don’t want to kill us in case they find a use for our powers. Mostly we’re just lost in the shuffle. It’s boring, but we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves by complaining. Other than the name, we don’t know what Project Insight is.”

Darcy said, “Well, not much we can do from here. Anyway, it’s nice to meet you. It would have been nicer to meet you somewhere else, but still.” She shook their hands, feeling dizzy both times. She sank onto one of the cots to think for a few minutes. Then she blinked. Then she fought a smile. _Must resist urge to laugh maniacally. Remember rule 20 of the overlord’s list. And of course rule 40._ She yawned and said. “OK, well, I’m still beat from that tranquilizer dart. I’m going to take a nap now. Please don’t wake me, even if they bring food.”

Darcy lay quietly on her cot, apparently asleep. About an hour later Judy and Michael heard a quiet bang from somewhere in the base. Then a few more, one or two bangs happened every few minutes. At one point a very worried guard came in on his usual rounds and they asked him what was happening. He saw that they were still in their cell and said “people’s heads are exploding randomly; it started with the higher ups, now almost everyone is dead. Good luck to you, I’m getting the hell out of here.” He had just run out the reinforced metal door of the dungeon when they heard another bang and a clink of something hitting the metal door. They tried to wake Darcy, who opened her eyes and asked what was going on. They told her and she asked grumpily, “Is there anything I can do about it?” They had to admit that there wasn’t, so she said, “Then why did you wake me? I’m going back to sleep.” A few hours later, the bangs from outside the dungeon stopped. A few minutes after the last one, the locks of each of the cells (all of them but theirs empty) started to explode outward in a spew of molten metal and flame. The door swung open and they woke Darcy again.

She saw the door and said “How did you do that?” They said “We didn’t, it just happened. We should try to get out of here.”

They started sneaking out of the base, Darcy found her wallet, but not her phone, damnit, in the next room. It quickly became apparent that they needn’t bother sneaking. Throughout the base, everyone was dead. As the guard had said, their heads had apparently exploded from the inside. When they found an exit, and found they were still in Manhattan, Darcy turned to the other two, handed them each $20 for a cab and said, “look, you guys can do what you want, tell people you escaped from Hydra or whatever. Me, I don’t want aaaaaaany part of this." Moving her hand like a Jedi she said "You never saw me, you never met me, you never heard of me! OK?” Judy and Michael nodded, Michael chuckled and said "and these aren't the droids we're looking for."

Darcy was still hungry, so she caught a cab back to the pizza place in time for a very late dinner. On a hunch she used her finder power on her phone and found it in the alley where the Hydra agents must have thrown it when they captured her. While eating what she decided was indeed the best pizza in New York City, she checked her messages. There was a voicemail, 38 missed calls and about a dozen texts from Jane. The voicemail amounted to “Where are you Darcy? Call me as soon as you can.” The texts were increasingly frantic.

Jane: Oh my God Darcy, Alexander Pierce, secretary of the World Security Council is dead, his head exploded.

Jane: So are hundreds of other government agents and officials. They are getting reports of this happening all over the world. SHIELD agents are dying the same way.

Jane: It keeps happening. Hundreds of people are dying every minute. It’s not just governments, major corporations are losing high level executives and some low level workers. No one knows how it’s happening or why.

Jane: Now reports are coming in that some government agents and officials are yelling “Hail Hydra” and gunning people down at random. They captured a few, only to have their heads explode later, while they were in custody.

Jane: Some of these Hydras’ heads are exploding while they are gunning people down. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to this except that the longer it goes on, the less important the jobs of the people who are dying are. It started with Alexander Pierce, now it is down to low level agents.

Jane: Darce, call me, let me know you are alright.

Jane: Darce?

Jane: The head explosions seem to have stopped. At least none have been reported in the last hour or so.

Jane: People are starting to come forward from what they say are Hydra bases all over the world where they have been held captive until the locks keeping them in started exploding about the same time as people’s heads stopped exploding.

Jane: Darce, some of these prisoners say Alexander Pierce was the leader of Hydra. Lots of the other dead government officials have been accused of being Hydra by the prisoners.

Jane: Darcy. Call me. I’m afraid that something’s happened to you. The police are in chaos so I can’t get them to trace your phone.

Jane: Reports are that not one Hydra agent has been found alive since the explosions stopped. Whatever happened may have gotten them all.

Jane: Darce?

 

Darcy called Jane. Jane picked up and said “Darce, is that you?”

Darcy: Yep. Sorry about that, I was in an arcade all day and had my phone off until I got to this pizza parlor. Oh, you gotta try this place! Then I saw your texts.

Jane: Are you OK?

Darcy: Of course, why wouldn’t I be?

Jane: It’s just that tens of thousands of people are dead. Lots of them in the government, though more and more of them are being identified as Hydra agents, maybe all of them will turn out to be.

Darcy: You didn’t think I was a Hydra agent, did you?

Jane: Don’t be silly. But we didn’t know that it was only Hydra agents, plus some of them started shooting people before they died. They think that those ones heard about the other ones dying and panicked.

Darcy: So how did they die?

Jane: Their heads exploded.

Darcy: Thanks Jane, because you didn’t already tell me that about a hundred times. I mean why did their heads explode?

Jane: They don’t know what caused it but it was like a tiny amount of very hot, very high pressure plasma just appeared in front of their brains, jetting toward the back.

Darcy: Wow, like someone opened a tiny portal to the heart of the Sun in their heads.

Jane: Darcy, were you actually paying attention when I was telling you about that astronomy book?

Darcy: Just a little. Listen, they’re closing in a half hour, but I’ll get a pizza for you, just how you like it. I’ll be home soon.

Jane: I’m glad you’re safe. Bye.

Darcy: I’m glad everyone is safe. Bye.

**Author's Note:**

> To save you from having to look these up, from the Evil Overlord list:
> 
> 20\. Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied, it's too easy to miss unexpected developments that a more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.
> 
> 40\. I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve.
> 
> Oh, if anyone is doing the math, if it's really a microsecond and assuming a 1mm^2 portal (square or a bit bigger than a mm across), then my back of the envelope calculations say that it would dump about 90 gm of mostly hydrogen gas (well, plasma really) into someone's head, moving at about 2 thousandths of the speed of light. Even without the heat and velocity, that mass of hydrogen "wants" to take up about a cubic meter of space at room temp and pressure. Altogether, it would probably kill everyone in the room, possibly everyone in the building. If that bothers you, you can assume that Darcy being new at this could only open the portals for a nanosecond each.


End file.
